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Re: Standard Average European

From:Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 15, 2008, 23:10
On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:33:34 +0200, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
> >Selon Tristan McLeay : >> >>> French requires the pronoun, though. Remember the Grandsirian >>> reanalysis... >> >> French is polysynthetic nowadays? > >Quickly delurking again... :)
Welcome back, and (belated) congratulations! I don't suppose you've had much time to do much conlanging lately -- your old website doesn't seem to have been updated. Judging from the types of comments made consistently by native Hexagonal speakers, contemporary spoken French _must_ be a different language. Jeff
>First I'd like to say it's nice not to be forgotten :) . > >Second, yes Tristan, *Spoken* French is a good example of a >polysynthetic language (hidden by an out-of-date orthography as a >synthetic language - although actually, I'd say French is really two >languages, one spoken and one written, a bit like Classical and Vulgar >Latin were very different, or like Standard Written Arabic vs. the >various spoken Arabic languages/dialects, or katharevousa/dimothiki -). >I don't have much time to explain my analysis in detail, but trust this >good old native speaker who isn't brainwashed by the prescriptive >grammatical establishment :) . > >If I find a moment, I'll be happy to substantiate my claim, but let's >just summarise some quick points already: >- Spoken French features verbal agreement with the three main >participants of the sentence. >- It features incorporation and suffixation of semantic items (like >adjectives in the nominal phrase, and adverbs and nouns in the verbal >phrase). >- It features a rather free topic-comment-oriented word order. >- Many of the so-called function words like articles and prepositions >are best seen as prefixes. > >Those features are sometimes slightly disguised due to the strong >prescriptive element of the French educational system in terms of French >teaching, which forces elements of the written language into the spoken >language, in the form of formality registers, with the more polite >registers looking more like the written language (that includes the >French language spoken on TV and in movies, which makes it in my ears >often sound rather forced and unnatural), and the more familiar >registers going more fully the polysynthetic way (this is not unlike the >katharevousa/dimothiki duality Greek has suffered from). But Spoken >French never goes as far as completely losing its polysynthetic form. > >OK, Gotta go now. If you want to know more I'll try and find some time >to write a more complete post on this subject. >-- >Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets. > >http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com >http://www.christophoronomicon.nl > >You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <christophe.grandsire@...>